Week 3
<- Back to Home Links This week we covered a good deal of information about links and how we can use them to enhance our websites. The two main areas discussed were anchored and external links. Anchored links redirect to an element or section of the page we are currently on, or a different part of the site but nothing from outside of the overall website. For the anchored links, we place the appropriate tag around the link we wish to anchor within the site, using the and tags. The visible portion of the link is supplied using href, or hypertext reference which we design to fit the page. The external links are what we use and see far more often. These include articles from journalistic or news-related sites, or links to videos on Youtube or ESPN. A great place to encounter these links are places such as Facebook, or Gmail. And we can usually tell them apart from anchored links due to the different appearance of the link, and the link target will clearly be an outside location from where we are currently. However, when we are coding links into our website, we must be sure to place the complete link into the source box, or else the link will not load. We may use shorthand for the visible portion of the link, so that it stands out or more readily tells our page viewers what to expect from the link in terms of its destination and content. Multimedia Importing images, videos, slideshows, and other multimedia elements into a website is essential for design and elegance. Without their presence a user may be swarmed by textual content and feel overwhelmed and lost within a website. Incorporating such effects are a start to an interactive website, and can be implemented in a number of ways depending on desire. HTML5 introduced an incorporation of many elements assisting with multimedia. Prebuilt video/audio players are now included naturally with simple implementation through recognized tags. Despite the natural player, a web developer must still consider the method of implementation: Media File or Media Source When using a media file, extra renders should be included to ensure browser compatibility. When using Media Source, an iframe element provided by YouTube or another hosting company can be used instead. It is important to test your multimedia on multiple platforms to ensure that it is cross-compatible. Several tags can also be used such as "loop", width/height", or "poster" that allow for more customization and usability within your website. The range of possibilities is large and growing for multimedia; how will you customize your implementation? CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is probably the second most important part of a web page design and goes hand in hand with the page layout. While HTML is the programming language used for the content of the webpage, CSS is a style sheet language used for describing and effecting the presentation of a document written in HTML, or any other markup language. This makes CSS a great and easy to use HTML tool that effectively separates the content from the presentation of the web page. This first advantage of using CSS to help modify the presentation of a web page is the increased design flexibility and interactivity incorporated in the language, as opposed to using the mark up languages. Due to this increased flexibility, web developers have much greater precision in how they affect the overall layout of their web pages. Another advantage of CSS is how easy and quickly updates can be made to a web page’s presentation. Instead of coding and manipulating the presentation of each tag in markup, a developer can use CSS to apply multiple rules to multiple elements on many different web pages at once. CSS allows for only a single document having to be modified to change many different aspects of multiple web pages. This allows development work to become much faster, less monotonous and results in a reduction in the amount of errors in the code. Additionally, CSS allows for web pages to be loaded much faster, due to browsers only having to download the CSS once and then apply it across all web pages at once. This is much more efficient than coding in markup and allows for faster internet browsing. However, even though there are many advantages to using CSS, there are disadvantages as well. CSS is largely browser dependent and is greatly affected by the support in said browsers. There are many different browsers that users could utilize to surf the internet, and each of these browsers interpret the CSS in different ways. This means developers need to account of each of these variations, making it difficult to have a web page look the same on each browser. Finally, CSS is very difficult to incorporate into older websites that did not initially use CSS in their design. By: John Saxon